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Hey Obama: No Snooping on Our Email Without a Warrant

Here’s the deal: right now, there’s a petition demanding reform to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (known by its acronym, ECPA), a would-be privacy law passed in 1986. The Justice Department has argued this outdated law gives them the right to read your old emails and the documents you store in the cloud with a simple subpoena, rather than a judge-issued warrant. That’s crazy—and unconstitutional—but we’ve got a chance to fix it. If we can get 100,000 signatures on this petition before December 12, President Obama will be forced to go on the record on this issue.

We've got some long-running concerns about White House petitions: You have to create an account in order to sign and control of the personal information you enter will be governed by the Whitehouse.gov privacy policy. But if you're comfortable with that, we think getting this petition over 100,000 signers by the deadline is extremely important. And the substance of the petition is really good—a meaningful update to ECPA that will bring online privacy law into the 21st Century, something we’ve been demanding for years.

ECPA reform is within our reach. It’s got momentum in Congress and a ton of support from industry. And although this is a very different issue from NSA mass spying, the attention on over-reaching surveillance has brought new life to the debate. Now we just have to show there’s grassroots support for protecting the privacy of our documents and emails. Signing this petition is the first step.